Got my tickets

Looks like I’ll be off to the 2010 Glastonbury festival, after a shakey few hours waiting for confirmation.

The new SeeTickets traffic management system sounded good on paper, but in fact was as big as fail as previous years – if not bigger. The key point was that in previous years, their server set up allowed a “once you’re in, you’re in” type scenario – so you keep hitting F5 and eventually the page loads – at that point you’re able to fly through the ticket buying process.

Not so this year. Instead, virtually every refresh took me to a “you are in a queue” page, which considering how sporadically I was let on the site and dropped again, sounds like full on bullshit to me. Its just a nice PR spin on “our servers are too busy, please try again later”. And if you’re lucky enough to get a form page, you submit and are thrown back into this mysterious “queue”.

Also (through poor planning perhaps) the “you are in a queue” page was set with a 20 second meta refresh. This is great as it means you can leave the page to keep trying to connect itself – except after you’ve entered your second set of details, you’ve submitted a form – so every modern browser won’t instantly refresh, but rather pop up a “do you want to resubmit this form” box with OK & cancel options. Fail.

Then to make it a little worse, it took nearly 16 hours to send out my confirmation email. So for that time I’m left with nothing but a screenshot of a reference numberless page telling me I’d be emailed shortly. Also at this point no money had been taken. So of course when I hear in the evening that tickets are sold out, panic starts to set in.

But aside from the epic seetickets fail, I’m booked up for another year. Just another 8 and a half months to wait. 🙂